Monday, May 21, 2012

Reading Books and Magazines

Question: Do you read
every book that you buy?

Answer: No. We buy
many more books than we read. And magazines, too. Do you have unread stacks of New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic
and Smithsonian lying in various
corners? What are you going to do about it?

Comment: You have to get into the reading material,
overcome inertia.

For novels, try
my technique of reading for ten minutes near the beginning, near the middle,
three-fourths and near the end. When you lose interest, try reading a paragraph
a page until you are caught again and want to read everything. Lose interest
again? Try the

Information
books: Read the foreword, the first and last paragraph of each chapter. Caught?
Read everything. Try reading the first sentence of each paragraph in a chapter.
Caught? Read everything.

Magazines? Read
the title, sub-title, first paragraph and last paragraph of the first article.
Know enough? If it’s important enough, summarize. Need to know more? Go back
and read the first sentence of each paragraph. Then summarize if it’s important
enough. Go on to the next article.